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The northern sector of my world

Hi guys...
First off, the map.

So over the weekend I thought to myself, 'I should make a map for my D&D campaign's immediate surroundings', and that gradually morphed into this. I found this forum, luckily enough, and found Wilbur as well, and combined with Photoshop, I managed to smack this together. It's not perfection in my eyes; I'm still learning how to do stuff. But if I were to improve it radically, I'd probably need to start over while keeping the same shape. For now, I'm happy to call this finished, but there'll probably be a revision at some point.

In terms of the content, it shows the northern 'sector' of my world, spanning from near the north pole to a bit above the equator (sort of the equivalent latitude of the Sahara desert). It's not a full 360° map of that area either, since the landmasses obviously wouldn't match up.

Any comments and critiques are very welcome, especially since I'm eager to learn ways to improve

Attached Thumbnails

Last edited by Kyrel; 08-23-2011 at 08:56 AM.
Reason: Uploaded an updated version of map (with border, scale and compass).

Looks pretty good! The labels seem a bit large to me, but that's a small quibble. So I'm curious as to what method you ended up using to get your desert, temperate and arctic biomes. Did you use the Wilbur latitude shader, or did you come up with your own gradient maps, or use some other method?

Looks pretty good! The labels seem a bit large to me, but that's a small quibble. So I'm curious as to what method you ended up using to get your desert, temperate and arctic biomes. Did you use the Wilbur latitude shader, or did you come up with your own gradient maps, or use some other method?

I ended up making three shaders in Wilbur; desert, icy, temperate. I rendered the texture for each climate, pulled them into PS, set the temperate one as the base layer and applied layer masks to the other two, and with a large low-opacity soft brush I gradually revealed bits of the desert and ice layers wherever I wanted them